Long ago I turned off my Pagefile

[badass]

My point was, how could you claim its of no befenit.

I was not claiming it was of no benefit at all.

You could argue that its of little benefit to 99% of use cases, now we have people buying 4gig o ram laptops for $350!

Nail on the head!
Though i'd say it's closer to 3/4 of users IMO

But it is of some benefit, that much is irefutable.

Agreed
It allows you to run applications that you wouldn't be able to otherwise.

However my issue is the punishment that the 75 ish % of users that have no use for it whatsoever.
It is possible to have the best of both worlds, where you get no performance hit until it looks likely you will need to use your pagefile, except that option is not available on Windows Vista.

This, IMHO is bad design.

TBH I tried it on Windows 7 RTM and noticed no difference so I'll more than likely switch it back on again.

[Paul Adams]

FWIW, there is one side effect that is often overlooked - the system cache.

If you remove the pagefile, so now physical memory == virtual memory and nothing can be paged out even if it is just wasting space after ageing.
This means less room for the system cache, which in turn can mean more disk I/O - not less.

Letting the kernel send to disk the memory pages that have not been accessed in a while is a Good Thing(tm).

In 5 years of supporting Windows I've seen ever such strange suggestions made pertaining to the pagefile and the reasons for making them - but not once any proof that disabling (or defragmenting) it actually improves performance (in a non-synthetic test).

The only occasion I remove the pagefile entirely (and disable Superfetch & Windows Search) is in virtual machines (not the host), or if trying to provoke exceptions through out of memory conditions in drivers or apps.